Bug Description

The "silent" mode in Pidgin used to prevent the "X is now online" notifications from popping up when you're busy. Since Jaunty & the new indicator applet, this indicator displays all these notifications even if Pidgin is in "silent" mode, which completely nullifies this option. Nobody on IRC was able to tell me if this was a bug, a feature or a matter of configuration.

Expected behaviour: When Pidgin is in "silent" mode, the indicator applet shouldn't display the "X is now online" notifications, it should only display the "new chat" notifications.

OK, follow-up after briefly discussing this issue during the dedicated IRC session of UbuntuOpenWeek ("An introduction to the messaging indicator" session by Ken Van Dine)

<guillom> QUESTION: the indicator applet now notifies about things that were filtered (and hidden) before (e.g. the getting-online notifications from pidgin when in silent mode); this looks like a regression, since now one is overwhelmed by useless notifications ; is this behaviour a bug, a feature or a matter of configuration?.
<kenvandine_wk> yes and no
<kenvandine_wk> for example, if your friend Jorge shows up online, yes it adds an indicator for that even so you can quickly IM him if you want to harrass him :)
<kenvandine_wk> but
<kenvandine_wk> since jorge didn't IM you, it goes away after some time limit without acting on it
<kenvandine_wk> i think it is like 30 seconds, but not sure
[...]
<kenvandine_wk> the indicator is more event based, it doesn't care what creates it
[...]
<kenvandine_wk> pidgin tells the indicator when there is an event you should be concerned about

It is a regression, since the indicator forces the display of notifications that the user chose to ignore by enabling the "silent mode" in Pidgin. But from what I understand of what Ken said, the issue comes from Pidgin, who doesn't filter the notification before it's sent to the indicator. So, it rather sounds like a Pidgin bug. If so, can someone close this one?

It turns out the "silent mode" I was talking about is actually an ambiguous localisation for "mute sounds", so it has nothing to do with getting-online notifications.

However, the default behaviour of Pidgin is to not display any notifications of this sort. The user have to install a plugin to get such notifications. I urge whoever added this behaviour in Ubuntu's Pidgin to reconsider their choice; let the user choose what they want to display. Forcing the display of unwanted notifications only encourages the user to ignore all messages from the indicator, which is a bad thing.

I found that Pidgin in Ubuntu has the libnotify plugin enabled by default with the box for new user sign on notifications checked. This gets out of hand really quickly for someone that has many hundreds of people in their buddy list. The way to disable this seems to be un-checking the box in the Pidgin libnotify plugin configuration. I am still receiving pop-up after pop-up right now even after un-checking the box but I'm guessing that perhaps it is still working through the initial queue from sign-on. :(